RED FLAG WEATHER

We go outside to listen.
Rotors. Each blade-
stroke a single giant’s blow
crushing air. Repeated,
repeated, getting closer
still invisible through canopies
of trees. Their brittle
leaves and needles.
Chopper’s not high but going fast
above the crowns. Now
past, the danger/disaster/
mayhem is somewhere
else, someone else’s, out
of sight and hearing.
Quiet now. No arrow-
cloud of smoke bearing
down the wind
on us. Not yet. Who can say
we’re safe?

WILDFIRE DARK

You went out with the dog.
The sky is smoky-black,
but the fire’s still two ridges east ­
almost too far for flame-glow.

The only light
is the after-burn of ash
carrying a wind-blown spark
of fear that hasn’t caught yet.

I search the house
for a flashlight
and listen for you calling
the dog in the woods in the dark.

Taylor Graham is a volunteer search-and-rescue dog handler in the Sierra Nevada, and also helps her husband (a retired wildlife biologist) with his field projects. Her poems have appeared in America, The Iowa Review, The New York Quarterly, Poetry International, Southern Humanities Review, and elsewhere, and she’s included in the anthology California Poetry: From the Gold Rush to the Present (Santa Clara University, 2004). Her latest book, The Downstairs Dance Floor (Texas Review Press, 2006), is winner of the Robert Phillips Poetry Chapbook Prize.

Email: Taylor Graham

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